How do ideas have sex? And why does that matter for innovation? Why do brains tend to systematically

misread the future? Why do we feel that the world is getting worse when by almost all the

measures we can make, it's getting better.

What if optimism is actually the more rational stance?

Is optimism a personality trait, or can it be evidence-based?

If innovation isn't primarily about lone geniuses, what is it really about? Today we're joined by

scientist and author Matt Ridley, as we talk about what it means to be, in Ridley's term,

a rational optimist. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand some of the most surprising aspects of our lives. So let's start with a question. What story do you tell yourself about the future? Because we all carry around a narrative, an internal model about where things are

headed, and that story shapes everything. It shapes our moods, our decisions, our sense of what is

possible. Now, one of the facets of history that I've always found the most fascinating is that every

generation believes that it's living

through uniquely perilous times. Every generation feels the shadow of something large and ominous

hanging overhead, something that makes this moment more fragile, more dangerous, and more on the brink than anything that came before.

Just as a personal example of this, when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, there was a very

specific cloud hanging over everything, and that was nuclear annihilation. When I was a kid,

we all watched a film called The Day After, and if you saw that, you know that it represented the zeitgeist of that time, which was that the world was going to end, not with a whimper, but a bang in a very specific way, and it was going to happen any year now.

So in my school, we practiced drills where we would get under our desks. Now, I think even as

kids, we appreciated at least somewhat that this wasn't really going to help. If a nuclear bomb

dropped, a little desk wasn't going to give us much protection. But still, we did the drills

because it was part of the atmosphere, this kind of ambient anxiety that everyone shared at the time.

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